Old-school technology can spark surprising innovations. By combining the vintage zoetrope concept with digital displays, [Mike Ando] created the Andotrope, a surprisingly simple omnidirectional display.
Unlike other 3D displays, the Andotrope lets you view a normal 2D video or images that appear identical irrespective of your viewing angle. The prototype demonstrated in the video below consists of a single smart phone and a black cylinder spinning at 1,800 RPM. A narrow slit in front of each display creates a “scanning” view that our brain interprets as a complete image, thanks to persistence of vision. [Mike] has also created larger version with a higher frame rate, by mounting two tablets back-to-back.
Surprisingly, the Andotrope appears to be an original implementation, and neither [Mike] nor we can find any similar devices with a digital display. We did cover one that used a paper printout in a a similar fashion. [Mike] is currently patenting his design, seeing the potential for smaller displays that need multi-angle visibility. The high rotational speed creates significant centrifugal force, which might limit the size of installations. Critically, display selection matters — any screen flicker becomes glaringly obvious at speed.
This device might be the first of its kind, but we’ve seen plenty of zoetropes over the years, including ones with digital displays or ingenious time-stretching tricks.
Nice coffee machine!
That’s amazing. Balancing the phone so the whole thing doesn’t vibrate of the table must have been a pain.
HAD, how yould you post this article without mentioning or including a video of “the dabber” device they made to use the touchscreens while they are inside the device?!?
Also the video of the large version with two tablets is flicker free and is a replica of Gehn’s Holographic Imager from Riven which is hella cool.
You need a small plaque in front of it stating “Please do not touch the screen, you leave finger marks”.
… you’ll leave …
Yes it would need Darwin award barriers.
** bloody finger marks
Well, or simply put glass enclosure
Vertical only (ugh) unless large diameter. Picture is not flat but cylindrical, if screen was wide curves would be worse.
Kinda neat and definitely has a niche somewhere, but for most applications it would probably be better just to have two or three screens facing in different directions. Could probably fix flicker issues by syncing the rpm with the refresh rate or similar
Video stated screen flicker is an artifact of filming and is not visible in person.
It seems perfect for conventions and things like that. A display that people can crowd around from any angle and look straight at has public space uses.
check the patent office website for info on provisional patents and do that right away. it’s cheap and diy. be sure to keep every scrap of info you have to document your work, esp. dates. if you work, be certain not to use any company resources for your invention. finally, excited as you are, i’d go easy on disclosing your work publicly until you talk to a patent atty. if you are serious, get a 30 min consult with a patent atty right away.
I think afraid.org 29
is pretty legit. Been around for years, full DNS like you’d have on a “real” domain and it’s free.
somewhere
A larger screen for gaming would be awesome. Split screen would work easily… At 359* the top half would be covered with the bottom half covered at 180*. No more cheating in Goldeneye 64.
A larger screen could be cut into 1/4s for 4 players.
How would this be any better for gaming than just using a monitor or TV?
Room for multiple players around the display.
it has the same problem the original mechanical television had, a tiny screen. you could recreate that too, glue the screen to a flat disk and spin it. then you would be able to view the image just the same whether you were lying in bed or standing up.
I can’t see this being popular enough to cover the patent costs but who knows. maybe there will be a use found in another field. I hear optical computers may be the next big thing. if you were to spin an optical image, it could help to multiplex data signals to different receivers around the circumference.
Teleconference meetings? On on the desk?
Video stated he made a bigger version with Android tablets.
I can’t wait to see the 100″ 16X9 display!
Wish there were more details than just 1800RPM
1800 rpm is what you get when you multiply 30 Hz by 60 seconds so that the rotation speed of the device is synced to the frame rate of the video playing or is a multiple of it.
Creator here! I’m still working on the build log for my second smaller phone based Andotrope, but my build log for the first one using two Android tablets is at https://www.riumplus.com/andotrope
Pretty cool but super annoying that he patented it. Dick move!
I’ve been lucky enough to know Mike personally for many years, and he isn’t going to go after you if you make one yourself, he’s just trying to protect his commercial rights. He deserves it, after all it’s something genuinely new, not just “do a simple thing but on the internet/with crypto”.
This is a great build, but I don’t know if I agree with this article going so far as to say there is “no similar device with a digital display” – Endo et al., 2000 (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/883953/) and the follow-on by Yendo et al., 2005 (https://tachilab.org/content/files/publication/ic/yendo200507SIGGRAPH.pdf) can be trivially driven to achieve the same omnidirectional output instead of a light field.
With a sufficiently fast display refresh rate, Mike Ando’s version could also be used as a light field display as well, while eliminating the need for counter-rotating the LED array in the prior work.
All the article said was they couldn’t find any similar displays, not that none existed.
Thank you for the references; I know I saw a commercial cylindrical display around 2005ish but it couldn’t possibly have used the Andotrope mechanism, it’s much more likely to have been an implementation of this 1d light bar technique.
also – great opportunity to go three deep in the “*ndo” citation chain, please publish
Would it be possible to lower the weight of the spinning part of this by using a rigid projector screen instead and a lightweight projector, perhaps bouncing the image off a mirror or through a prism?
well, lower weight and/or get a bigger image of course….
I worked on similar technology in 2006 in Slovenia, encompassing paper, LED and LCD solutions, including the transfer of power l, here is the article about the power transfer part http://intranet.teces.si/prikazi.asp?vsebina=info%2Fobvestilo.asp&id=114&jezik=1033
It would be pretty cool to view 3D models using head tracking to make it feel more organic.
It would obviously limit the viewer to a single user, but it would occupy a 3D space.
That’s an interesting approach. OTOH if you had a fast enough display (including the rendering part) then if you alter the display as you rotate it, everyone should be able to walk around and see different faces of the 3d object. Given 1800 rpm and the need to adjust slightly for each angle, I doubt the current crop of phones are fast enough. Maybe a display on a slip ring to a high end GPU but that sounds pretty complex.